Welcome back to a pre-Dominion/Fox edition of What I’m Hearing.

Programming notes: This week on The Town, Lucas Shaw and I welcomed Max to the streaming wars, First Amendment litigator Doug Mirell pre-gamed Dominion vs. Fox, and I parsed some Murdoch family politics with Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman. Subscribe via Spotify or Apple.

Discussed in this issue: Kevin Costner, Zack van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, Jen Salke, Gerry Cardinale, Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett, Bob Iger, Dan Webb, and Sarah Paulson’s multi-million-dollar mobile home.

Before we begin, Puck’s legal expert Eriq Gardner is in Wilmington, Delaware for the Dominion vs. Fox trial, which starts this week. He’ll have great coverage in his newsletter The Rainmaker (sign up here), and tonight I asked him for a quick primer on the key players…

Dominion is being coy about its top dog among its two dozen attorneys, but Justin Nelson of the Susman Godfrey firm has been given the most responsibility, including taking Murdoch’s deposition. Nelson, a Sandra Day O’Connor clerk, once ran for Texas attorney general and is the founder of One Nation One Vote, a nonprofit pushing to elect the U.S. president by popular vote. For the next six weeks, he’s focused on the 12 votes of this jury. –Eriq Gardner

Now to our regularly scheduled programming…

Runner up: “It isn’t fundamentally that good a business.” –Warren Buffett, taking a shot on CNBC at Paramount Global, which is one of his largest media holdings, and adding, “Well, we’ll see what happens” when asked why he owns so much of its stock, seemingly suggesting he’s anticipating a sale of the company.

Our usual Tuesday WIH+ newsletterer Julia Alexander is traveling for the next couple weeks and filed this first part of her check-in on what the streaming services are doing right and wrong, so I’m running it in WIH Proper tonight….

The confusion plays out in all kinds of ways, but this TV executive was complaining about a practical challenge: when shopping a new project to a streamer, there’s essentially no benchmark for success or failure. Every streamer has its own greenlight process, its own strategy for increasing subscribers and lowering churn, and virtually nobody wants to share the numbers that justify these decisions.

In short, streaming is still largely a black box. And Wall Street is still figuring out which philosophies are sound and which are self-serving. As I wrote last week, for example, there’s only so much we can infer from the paltry 37 percent completion rate for Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. We also want to know the demographics of the subscribers it brought in, how many of them stayed after watching Rings, and how likely they were to stick around for Jack Ryan, too, and so on.

Part of my job as director of strategy at Parrot Analytics involves advising creative executives about the performance of their projects on various platforms. That means analyzing our proprietary audience demand data and running the numbers on third party data from Nielsen, Antenna, Google Trends, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and more. In the process, I’m usually able to navigate around the black boxes to figure out what each streamer is looking for—which genres are working (or not), what’s missing from programming slates, and so forth. It is also possible to determine where a platform should be licensing its content, or where it should be looking to license or buy certain types of show. This is an experiment that I call Platform Chess.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be applying Platform Chess to all the major streamers—offering insights into what seems to be working, where they want to grow, and in some cases, where they can find the content that they need. I’m not trying to identify a fantastic show—that’s for the creative teams to decide—but I do have insights into the genres and formats that are best suited to each streamer. In part, this comes down to measuring what the customers of each platform want and whether the executives are supplying it.

So here’s part one, on the Tech Lords: Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+.

OK, it’s not a perfect comparison. But looking at the market opportunity for Prime Video, The Boys offers a similar value proposition. Parrot data suggests that the widest delta between supply and demand on Amazon’s platform is for comedies, superhero-led shows, and animation. The Boys, which checks two of those boxes, is one of the few Prime Video series to chart on Nielsen, and its Season 3 finale is one of only three Amazon shows to amass more than 1 billion minutes streamed in a week.

You can already see how Amazon is responding to these audience preferences. The Boys Presents: Diabolical, an animated spinoff, and The Legend of Vox Machina, another animated series cut from the same gory comedy cloth, are both among the best-reviewed originals ever released on Amazon. While the company has never released viewership data, and they haven’t charted on Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 list, Amazon did renew Vox Machina for a third season before the second premiered. In addition, the company signed Joe Quesada, the former longtime Marvel Comics editor, to develop new comics, TV, and film I.P. It also licenses animated work from D.C. that Warner Bros. Discovery is looking to offload, including J.J. Abrams’ Batman: Caped Crusader, which will premiere two seasons on Prime Video. Amazon clearly sees the younger male cohort as valuable. This audience will buy more merch, try more immersive experiences, and follow more spin-offs. See: Stranger Things or the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Amazon has clearly been studying successes within specific demos and trying to replicate those hits for wider audiences. Superheroes are a way to expand upon the male audience and reach a younger cohort—especially as demand for hero shows outpaces supply. And tying this back to animation, which is young but more female-skewing, there’s an opportunity for Amazon to attract new audiences by playing within various subgenres and styles while building out big I.P. plays. You can see how an entire franchise world like The Boys can help serve both those areas.

Here are some comps: Amazon sees a 5.1 percent gap between supply and demand in animation, while Netflix comes in at only 3.8 percent and Paramount+ has -1.8 percent, meaning that investment in animation should actually be pulled back slightly. For Amazon, it’s a way to build on I.P., like The Boys, at a more cost effective level and for a slightly different audience.

Another area where Amazon is underserved is horror. Although there is less of a delta between supply and demand for the genre, there is still a .5 percent gap in favor of more horror content, according to Parrot data. The company seems to be addressing this demand through partnerships, like the one with Jason Blum’s Blumhouse, to bring original horror films to Prime Video. New critically acclaimed titles like Swarm can bring audiences to the platform that normally must go to theaters for horror. Just as with The Boys, there’s a clear audience that could be a core base for Prime Video, and its appetite is not being adequately served.

But the data does point to one big narrative: Apple TV+ has a supply issue. The critical acclaim is there, as is growing search interest in its original series and films. And Apple has been picking up customers who have canceled Netflix (19 percent of those who bailed on Netflix signed up for Apple as of Q1 2022, according to Antenna). Parrot data suggests a gap of 10 percent more demand than supply for comedies, and 15 percent more demand than supply for dramas.

Apple TV+’s smaller content offering highlights the importance of volume, which is the most basic way of raising the perceived value of a streamer. The reason that Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav wants to introduce additional Discovery content to the newly-rebranded Max is because the perceived value of the service presumably would increase as the content library grows. It’s straight forward logic: more stuff widens discoverability and the total addressable market, all laddering up to higher perceived value.

This is Apple’s biggest struggle. Others boost their volume and value by building or acquiring a catalog—Netflix spent billions over the years to get its library to 50 percent originals, but the company still extracts huge value from licensed titles like Dragged Across Concrete, a Mel Gibson film from 2018 that recently shot into the Global Top 10 list. Apple doesn’t have its own library like Disney or the other traditional studios, nor does the company seem interested in licensing a big catalog to supplement its originals. Even other genres where demand outpaces supply —including variety programming, like The Problem with Jon Stewart at 0.8 percent—can be supported by finding the right content to license.

What’s more concerning about Apple TV+ is that many genres, including action/adventure and documentary, are registering strong gaps in the negative, per Parrot data. That means supply outpaces demand, or that despite its low overall volume, Apple is making too much of certain content. The docs category, in particular, registers -9 percent in demand against the total supply share across originals. This could be an issue within the originals bucket in general, or it could be a mismatch with what the creative team under Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht thinks the Apple TV+ audience is looking for.

This doesn’t suggest that Apple is finished. Far from it. Netflix wasn’t even playing in the unscripted space seven years ago, and now reality is a big focus. Apple TV+ needs to bring in those broader audiences through drama and comedies before it can determine that audience’s interests at large. Netflix has the advantage of scale, which feeds stronger data about what people want. Apple has a seemingly endless ability to toss money at programming, and docs are still a cost effective way to keep audiences after a Ted Lasso or Morning Show episode. The viewers of Apple TV+, however, aren’t interested in the unscripted content that Apple is currently programming.

Check back next week for Julia’s thoughts on The Incumbents (Paramount+, Peacock, and Hulu). Part III will focus on The Heavyweights (Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max).

Alex Sherman notes that David Zaslav’s strategy with Max isn’t that different from the AT&T guys he’s spent a year disparaging, just at a lower price point. [CNBC]

Observation: Seeing Love & Death—a David E. Kelley limited series with Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons, two stars I associate with prestige drama—now marketed as a Max Original that will premiere April 27 on Max, I immediately thought, Oh, I guess it wasn’t good enough for HBO. “Max Originals” aren’t new, of course, but that tightrope of perception was easier walked when they aired on HBO Max. Like Hacks or Flight Attendant, it was HBO quality, just aimed slightly differently. Now, there’s no HBO branding to float that perception.

My partner William Cohan is a little less bullish on the impact of Max on HBO. [Puck]

Potentially important question: How much will the bipartisan anti-TikTok movement ensnare Hollywood and its self-censorship to appease China? [LA Times]

As usual, the music industry is being forced to reckon with a new technology (A.I.) before Hollywood will eventually freak out. [Redef]

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred wants a national streaming service for all 30 teams to take over the imploding regional sports network system. Good luck with that, at least in the short term. [Athletic]

Question: MLB games are waaaaay more fun to watch on TV now that they move fast and end in 2.5 hours. Will this juice viewership? That’s probably a longer-term question, habits take a while to shift.

P.R. guy Chris Ortman wrote an amusing fake briefing memo with press guidance, a draft statement, and probable Q&A for the Roy siblings to handle the Logan news. [LinkedIn]

Mobile homes in Malibu’s Paradise Cove are now going for $5 million, thanks to celebs like Sarah Paulson, Matthew McConaughey, and Jack Nicholson’s daughter. But hey, the lease payments are cheap! [WSJ]

A few more: Looks like Los Angeles magazine has won the battle of Jay Penske, with its profile of the trade media monopolist—sorry, entrepreneur—set to post this week, ahead of Vanity Fair’s piece on the same subject. We can compare and contrast! ... Michael Wolff was spotted in Wilmington today with the rest of the Dominion vs Fox media throng. Might we get Fire & Fury: Rupert on Trial? … An Amazon Studios rep insists to me that the company is not boycotting The Hollywood Reporter in retaliation for a Kim Masters story critical of its programming strategy, as Amazon had privately threatened. We’ll see.

“Ben and Gerry, welcome to the buyout lottery! The model is lucrative as long as you’ve got suckers willing to overpay.” –An analyst

“[You are] right, it’s a bad idea to deficit finance things that aren’t good and/or feature unknown filmmakers and cast. So let’s call this what it is—an ‘enduring star’ making sure he and his crew get paid extra well for movies they wanted to make anyway. It might not be revolutionary but it’s a lot more involvement with the business side than most stars are willing or able to take on.” –An executive

“Given the choices of talents to bet on, RedBird picked wisely in Ben and Matt [Damon]. They’re the perfect mix of commercial and prestige, with relationships both younger and older… I’m jealous.” –An investor

“Gerry must think Skydance [in which RedBird invests] proves capital + talent relationships = an end run around the streamers and thus success. But Skydance was able to hang in there after a bunch of flops due to a) the enormous wealth of the Ellison family, and b) the resilience of David Ellison as a leader. You think Ben Affleck is still going to be interested in being the C.E.O. of a film finance company in ten years? In five?” –A lawyer

“If your entire business model is predicated on worldwide oversales to steamers, you aren’t reinventing anything and could be running into a brick wall.” –Another executive

Got a question, comment, complaint, or tips for fun things to do in Vancouver? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.